Seven Days in Haiku

Today marks an entire week of using Haiku as my primary operating system. This is my first PC to get the most out of any BeOS related operating system to date. My old 200MHz Toshiba ran R5 PE just fine but without any networking. My eMachine ran Zeta just fine, but once again, there were networking issues (and Zeta was pronounced dead around this time). In the age of the Internet, this pretty much forced me away from BeOS and its decendants until now.

Tugs at the Heartstrings

I don’t know why BeOS has always caught my eye, but its had a deathgrip on me. Maybe it’s the Deskbar, maybe it’s the windowing — I’m not terribly sure. It was already dead when I discovered it, and I still fell in love. I discovered OpenBeOS (now Haiku) almost immediately after. It is a version of BeOS built from the ground up in an open source manner. It was inspiring to know that there were dedicated fans trying to replicate their beloved operating system. This only added to the mystique of BeOS for me. It’s definitely been a long and tough road for them, but the fruits of their labors are definitely shining brightly now.

I’ve been blessed with an Acer Aspire One (AOA150). I say this because it is almost fully compatible with Haiku. The only things that I really would like to see in working order are my webcam and mic. These are definitely things I can personally bear without for the sake of enjoying a direct descendant of BeOS.

On the official website, they’ve made the first alpha release available. You can download a CD, USB, or even a virtual machine image. Since I am using a netbook with no CD/DVD drive, I had to opt for the raw USB image. There are multiple guides/methods scattered around the Internet on how to make a USB drive bootable (including on the Haiku website). After I created mine, I immediately rebooted and dove into my first run of Haiku.

The loading screen is very similar to the old BeOS one. It was refreshing to see those little icons light up instead of a Windows status bar. There’s something more friendly about little isometric icons than a green bar. Anyway, it was a little bit of a wait to get to the desktop. This is understandable, though, as I’m loading everything from the USB drive and not a hard drive. I get to the desktop, and the Deskbar and icons load without a hitch. I try browsing around with BeZillaBrowser, and I’m connected to the Internet just fine (through my wiredconnection). Here’s where my next test comes in before I can decide if I would consider allowing Haiku to be my primary OS.

Conncectivity

I’d been reading about the experimental WiFi support and, from what I understood, the Atheros in my AOA150 should work. At the time of writing this article, we’re limited to only unsecured networks, though. That’s fine with me. So I went to the WiFi website and downloaded the drivers and installed them. It was as simple as running a script and then rebooting. When I got back to the desktop without my wired connection plugged in, I started up BeZillaBrowser. Magic, it worked perfectly. This was the defining moment when I knew it was time to install Haiku.

I fired up the installer application and followed the guide on the Haiku website. Afterwards, I rebooted without my USB drive plugged in. Everything loaded up just like I was bootingoff the USB drive, but lightyears faster. It seemed like only 10 seconds after I hit the power button that I was already staring at the Haiku desktop.

Media

I loaded up Vision, probably my favorite IRC client aside from Colloquoy (even though I’m a Windows guy). I joined #haiku on freenode and began researching Flash support. I knew, previous to installing Haiku, that there wasn’t going to be any Flash while browsing with BeZillaBrowser. It turns out that there’s an in-the-works port of Gnash. It’s capable of playing YouTube videos and thelike. However, there are bugs and a lot of work to be done. So, I decided to just suffer without watching videos all over the Internet for now. Maybe after writing this article I’ll get around to checking out Gnash. For now, I just usethe Download Helper extension for Firefox/BeZillaBrowser to watch YouTube in tandem with VLC media player.

This brings me to my next topic. I had to copy all of my files to the Haiku drive via USB because my router loves to drop connections. During this process, the experimental WiFi would drop its connection during long transfers through USB. I submitted this in a bug report to the appropriate place and it will be looked into. Once I got all my stuff copied over I had to find alternative applications to Windows’ to enjoy them.

For videos, I settled with VLC media player. It’s an older version, but it definitely works. It played 90% of my videos that the newer version on Windows played. For music, I settled with CL-Amp. I’ve been a foobar2000 fan for quite a few years on Windows, but that’s not an option on Haiku. I used Winamp before foobar2000, and CL-Amp is pretty much an exact replica of Winamp. So it wasn’t painful at all to use it instead of foobar2000. I even got to use my old favorite skin for Winamp with it: Major Tom Remix. Upon plugging in my earphones to listen to music, though, I realized it didn’t mute my speakers. I had to do this manually, which is no big deal.

Quash Those Bugs

Now, let’s get into the bugs. Some are small, some are big. The WiFi dropping was okay — it’s experimental. When I reboot, I have to keep it off for a few seconds or the WiFi won’t reconnect properly. Not a big deal, and I’ve submitted a bug report on that. It’s kind of irrelevant, too, as they’re not in the maincode for Haiku. However, the other bugs are.

I’ve found that copying files into folders, if you hover over them too long, can and will crash the Tracker application. I also wanted to play some Sega Master System games with the BeSmsPlus emulator, which failed to load. Both of these issues are being looked into or already fixed upon writing this article. There are other minor crashes/glitches that don’t really impede on my usage of the OS that I’m going to submit bug report tickets for as well. All of the tickets that I’ve sent in have gotten almost immediate attention from thedevelopers. That’s a great thing to know, especially when I’m keeping this thing as my primary OS.

Generally, the day-to-day usage has been pretty uneventful aside from the bugs that I stated above– as in not much has gone wrong with daily usage. It’s been completely stable for me and the only time I’ve needed to reboot was when my WiFi dropped after 23 hours of uptime. As I said earlier, I have to reboot and keep it off for a few moments in order for Haiku to re-establish the connection properly.

Happy Sigh

Bugs and quirks aside, I’m satisfied with running Haiku as my primary OS. I was running Windows 7 Ultimate before this, and while it isn’t as advanced, it definitely earned its place in my heart. With more bug reports, development, and a steadfast fan base, Haiku can become a proper desktop-oriented OS, too. Hopefully, in the near future, I can enjoy Flash and my webcam (the only things I yearn for). I can live happily without them for now because I can finally use the OS I’ve always wanted to.

57 Comments

If you are not interested in a browser that actually works adequately and without major slow-downs and crashes, then sure, it’s a good deal. But if you are into the Internet age, then Haiku doesn’t cut it. Let’s face it and not hide behind our finger for the sake of supporting an OS project. I loved BeOS, I like Haiku as an idea, and I wish the best for the project. But I would never use it as my main OS. It doesn’t do anything that I want to do properly.

It depends on how much you rely on web apps and modern internet technologies. I find most of my web browsing habits can be accomplished with any browser, even elinks. I gave up on almost anything and went back to simple text based tools for most stuff. It works well, so it is possible.

Us techies/geeks have very different ways of interacting with our computers than other people, so we surely don’t need Mac OSX to make good use of our stuff. In fact, xmonad, opera, mplayer, rtorrent and alpine is all I need and I don’t regret going the simple way. It’s wonderfully simple once you get the hold of it, not matter what others think.

So I think, even when Haiku is not yet ready, it is possible to do something with it.

Give it time, Eugenia. I’m confident that within 4 years, Haiku will reach the maturity/usability of popular Linux distros, and after that, it will definately be the 3rd most popular desktop OS. All it takes is a little bit of time.

Yes, it will take another decade until it has the polish of Windows/MacOSX. Most of us here on OSNews can live with the rough/sharp edges of these young OS’s. We’re enjoying it right now, and we look forward to watching it mature and grow.

Linux in 4 years will still be using the “bazaar” model for most of it’s userland. So it will still be an unpolished incoherent OS with little attention to detail. That has no hope of getting ever fixed.

Also at the current rate, in 4 years Linux will require a 50 core CPU with 50 Gigs of RAM to be able to run decently as a desktop. So that’s why even waiting 20 years for Haiku is preferable.

It isn’t the Linux kernel that is the problem. It’s the “Linux” userspace.

Developers aren’t taking any care with RAM requirements. They hardly ever test with serious amounts of data (Nobody has 500,000 emails in their IMAP. That would be crazy!). They don’t stop to think about performance issues with 4,200 RPM laptop drives (We will have our file picker seek all over the disk to read an icon for each file in the directory! Oh, we never tested that with 10,000 files…) And they never examine the disk seek behavior of their application on a cold cache start (Oh, Firefox can read every little xul and css and jar file one at a time to start up…Windows Vista will preload all that for us!)

Really? Could be, I suppose. I have 14,044 emails via IMAP at the moment without a problem, but I could just be lucky. Or maybe I receive unusually small emails?

Now, 10,000 files in one directory? That’s pathological! 🙂 I created one just to test and opened it on both XP (2 seconds) and Mint with Gnome (35 seconds), so our experiences jive there.

However, Firefox launches *far* faster on Linux than IE7 on XP, even comparing my Linux Starling netbook to my D630 XP notebook. It’s more stable, too. And it handles tabs much, much better – on XP, IE7 takes 6-7 seconds before a new tab is available to use (the tab says “Connecting…” until then, and IE7 is frozen), while Firefox opens a new tab as fast as I can type on every Linux machine I’ve used. But again, perhaps my Linux is better configured than yours. Or perhaps my XP machine (last 3 XP machines, actually ) is badly configured?

I suppose YMMV is the watchword of the day. Overall, though, I find that I’m far more productive on Linux than on XP. We’ll see about 7 when it’s released next week. 🙂

But if you are into the Internet age, then Haiku doesn’t cut it. Let’s face it and not hide behind our finger for the sake of supporting an OS project.

Pretty vague statements I think…

Most of my internet uses are indeed supported by Haiku’s BezillaBrowser.

The major missing feature is Flash support… which I’m guess you probably rely on pretty heavily?

FF2 does also lack speed and better Javascript/HTML5 support that we expect from newer browsers. Google Wave for example, doesn’t quite work in Haiku

I also run Haiku ~75% of the time I fire up my AOA150. I’ve been using the experimental wifi driver, with my router currently unsecured (I essentially live in the middle of nowhere, so this isn’t a huge deal for me). I can chat on IRC, surf the web, read emails, and work on some porting projects. This is pretty much the bulk of my evening computer usage anyway, so I’d say it’s pretty close to being my primary OS as well

I spend much of my time in a terminal, so the browser issue isn’t such a big deal for me either. As long as I can get to OSnews!

Regarding the unsecured wifi.. if I locked down my router to only allow my Haiku machines MAC address, would that work? Would give a small amount of security at least. How about hiding the SSID also?

Hiding the SSID won’t help because the experimental wifi stack doesn’t allow you to specify one yet (it just searches for the strongest unsecured network it can find).

As for MAC filtering – that would probably keep the majority of people from utilizing your connection, but keep in mind it 1) doesn’t encrypt your traffic (so always make sure to use https and ssh for remote connections you want secured) and 2) can be thwarted by cloning the MAC on another machine (this would require someone to be snooping traffic to determine which MACs are in the area, and cloning them until they find one that seems to work).

I’ve been using the experimental wifi driver, with my router currently unsecured (I essentially live in the middle of nowhere, so this isn’t a huge deal for me).

If it doesn’t support WPA1/2 or even WEP this is pretty much a showstopper for any normal person.

A non-issue currently – Haiku itself isn’t meant for “normal users” at this point, and the wifi support isn’t included or enabled by default. Anyone who installs experimental software on an Alpha OS probably isn’t a “normal user.”

And I highly doubt that the developers plan to release a final/stable version without any encryption support.

“If you are not interested in a browser that actually works adequately and without major slow-downs and crashes, then sure, it’s a good deal. But if you are into the Internet age, then Mozilla doesn’t cut it. Let’s face it and not hide behind our finger for the sake of supporting a browser project. I loved Netscape , I like Mozilla as an idea, and I wish the best for the project. But I would never use it as my main browser. It doesn’t do anything that I want to do properly.”

Fortunately the mozilla people didn’t really care and despite IE dominance and AOL despair (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html), they pulled off firefox and now it is very popular.

playing devil’s advocate, Mozilla was in a slightly different position as it could be installed along side IE without having to reboot or do anything else with the computer.

Which is not to say that it’s not a great OS, as i too was blown away by BE R5 at the speed and layout of the UI.Im currently downloading the alpha to, which from screen shots and reviews hints at something which is classed as a beta with other OS’s/Software

“playing devil’s advocate, Mozilla was in a slightly different position as it could be installed along side IE without having to reboot or do anything else with the computer.”

At that time, IE dominance was so strong that there was a real concern that eventually you wouldn’t be able to use the web without IE. If mozilla wasn’t amazingly successful, it would’ve been a pointless waste of time. People criticized mozilla all the time. But they didn’t give up.

Now we have webkit and gecko and it is very easy for any altOS to have a browser that actually works. Haiku isn’t doomed; it just needs more help on bezilla and the webkit browser.

Have to agree with you on this one. I gave it a shot on my netbook, but it’s just not ready for me yet. I could do without the flash, but no flash, in progress wifi, and firefox 2.x combined just didn’t cut it. I’m not even fond of using firefox 3.x with JIT for webapps compared to chromium, and 2.x was painful.

It reminds me a bit of kde 4.0. Great framework, but it needs applications to be built on it still. Better network drivers, and a webkit based browser will increase the usability by bounds.

Still not sure about the flash thing though. I mean, giving up hulu? Not a fun idea.

Considering Eugenia has been slagging of Haiku since its inception I wouldn’t expect much else from her.

Face it BeOS is dead and out of all the contenders to carry the mantle, Haiku has been the one to deliver the goods. Support of stick with your beloved OS-X or what ever makes you feel good. When it comes to the desktop nothing can deliver variety of apps like Windows can but yet we still see many use alternatives and Haiku is nothing more than one of the alternatives at this stage.

Very stupid, uninformed comment/question on my part, but: I’d expect that the Alpha release, and most of the development leading up to it, would be about creating stable-and-working system-level software, with userspace apps to follow. Given that there’s (apparently) a fair amount of community enthusiasm, and given that it supports a POSIX compatability system (doesn’t it?), I’d be real surprised if user-space third-party apps didn’t start appearing pretty quickly, once the core OS stabilizes. I mean, how hard is it to port, say, Vim, Gnash, ffmpeg, or the WebKit or Gecko engines to a new POSIX environment?

A Gnash port does exist (and even has a BeZillaBrowser plugin), but has about a dozen dependencies in grand FOSS style (making it a nasty port), and it still needs to be updated for the R1/Alpha1 build of Haiku. I found it rather sluggish in Haiku, however…

Haiku already includes an ffmpeg backend as a media kit plugin for decoding of many audio/video formats.

Haiku’s BeZillaBrowser is based on Firefox 2, so contains Gecko, sadly, FF3 and newer requires a port of Cairo which… still remains in a partially-ported state, and nobody seems interested in stepping forward to finish it.

Webkit is ported, and most of the patches are already pushed upstream – there is a project to build a native browser on top of Webkit already, but the progress hasn’t been super fast yet.

I love the Haiku project and used BeOS R5 as my primary system years ago, but Eugenia is correct in the sense that Haiku is NOT ready to be used as a primary desktop. Not yet. Not for me anyway, nor for the vast majority of users. I am glad the OP is enjoying it.

As someone who, until July, has used Zeta (BeOS derivate) as main (and only!) OS at home, I think I have a say in this, and I agree with Tuishimi.

Several basic operations cannot be done. Many Flash sites (there are many, even ones you’ll need), many Java sites (internet banking, to name an example) – you can pretty much forget about those to be accessible.

Then let’s talk about Office compatibility. DOCX… XLSX… no? Oh. DOC support is minimal. You’re not able to even import graphics embedded within the documents. So the only thing you can turn to is Google Docs. It’s a life saver!

I also started missing Skype support by the way.

Conclusion: I still love BeOS and would switch to Haiku in a heartbeat if I could run it as my primary OS. I’m currently very happy to not have these limitations anymore under Mac OS X. So I agree with Eugenia and Tuishimi… it is not really possible at this point. I’ve accepted & lived with the impairments for several years and now they have gotten to a point where they are too difficult to handle, I had to make a switch to a different OS. This is the reality right now.

P.S.: Note that I do *NOT* wish to complain about these impairments. I voluntarily chose to accept the lack of support of some technological advancements and I was okay with it. I still do not regret it and I commend this article’s author to have given it a shot.

Ok, what part of Alpha Software don’t people get? Of course Haiku ain’t ready for mainstream computing yet. I would hope that by Beta stage there is more usability for the OS and some app development along the lines of:

Office app that is Haiku Native like GOBE Productive BUT supports Open Office File Formats (don’t want OO just a Haiku Native app that is read/write compatible with PDF support as well).

Soundplay, been a great little audio player for BeOS and shouldn’t take much to take across to Haiku.

VideoLAN but a current build

A native browser or Opera 10 which ever.

A Skype like app that is native and allows Skype users to communicate.

That would be great for starters and then moving on apps that really take on the media capabilities that Haiku following in BeOS footsteps, can deliver.

Audio – something like Reaper but Haiku Native

Video – something semi pro to start with handling of multiple audio and video streams edited on the same timeline with chapter marking andd DVD/BlueRay Disc Authoring from the same app. I hate Premier/Encore where you have to move between them. Again, Haiku Native and ready for a step up to x64 when Haiku moves into that sphere. Still given how capable BeOS was back in the day of minuscule ram requirements and I did do video editing on it, x86 would still have plenty to offer.

But back to now, it’s Alpha Release 1 software and for that Haiku is pretty darn good.

If you are not interested in a browser that actually works adequately and without major slow-downs and crashes, then sure, it’s a good deal. But if you are into the Internet age, then Haiku doesn’t cut it.

I beg to differ – I’ve personally used plain ‘ol R5 on my main work computer since mid-2003. In fact this is for a company that mainly focuses on Internet-related services, so I’m a bit puzzled by the “if you are into the Internet age, then Haiku doesn’t cut it” claim.

I’m probably like Eugenia in that I would miss functionality I have on my Windows and Linux (and even OpenBSD boxes, but for a surfing/email-reading terminal (which is all I think I could use a netbook for), maybe it’s not so much a handicap.

Great report, thanks! I wish you had gone a little more into the actual “review”, I know very little about BeOS, and I would like to read a little more about it before trying a install.

It’s interesting to see that Flash and wi-fi are the greatest issues in a project that is so different from the usual FLOSS suspects. It shows that it’s not just paranoia. these things are really inherently more complicated to deal with, and the industry made bad choices when developing them.

While not ready yet for the mainstream, current versions are good enough to do serious Haiku programming which would tipically include looking things up on the net etc. Already a huge advantage over cross-compiling.

Besides… bug hunting should be the prime entertainment on Haiku right now – Flash videos would only distract you

This review don’t speak at all about the main point of BeOS: reactivity!

Does Haiku manage to reproduce this BeOS feature of having a snappy user interface?

IMHO, that was the main selling point of BeOS and Linux and Windows still don’t have this ‘feature’ (on computers much more powerful 🙁 ), so if Haiku manage to reproduce it then it’s interesting to use, otherwise why bother?

Especially as with SSDs and programs adaptions to multi-core, mainstream OS may become finally responsive..

I’ve loved BeOS since before it was even ported to x86. Bought it when it was ported and V3 and subsequently bought 5 Pro. Tried the Zeta live CD some time back and it was okay but slow. Might have to give it a shot this weekend just for old times sake.

I have a laptop I’ve been saving to run Haiku on, but it doesn’t have built in ethernet or USB2. Is there support for the PCMCIA bus being worked on?

Sadly, not at the moment

I have several old laptops with PCMCIA card slots also, but the general opinion is that PCMCIA is not all that important at the moment.

On the other hand, I have two different USB wired ethernet adapters that work (one is Pegasus based and has a driver included with Haiku, the other as ASIX based, which requires compiling the usb_asix driver manually from the Haiku repo as it was still buggy when Alpha 1 was done, although a major bug was just fixed in it!) They should work in USB 1.1 ports also, albeit slower

And the only “hourglass icon” I ever saw was part of an application that rendered landscapes (which took a few seconds). I absolutely HATE hourglass icons – no matter how pretty they try to make them, it’s just decoration for a total failure of design. Whether it’s Vista & 7’s “ring of eternity”, OS X’s “magical pinwheel of duh”, or the completely retarded XP “pointer + hourglass” which means what exactly:

“Oh, the system’s having a seizure. But you might as well try to click something and bring it totally to it’s knees.”

Yes, I believe they had to actually design their own hourglass (it was a clock-style animation) for the app – as such a horrible thing was not part of BeOS. And you only saw the custom cursor when the app was selected, outside of the app all was normal and pointy.

For me the size of an OS matters ALOT, it should be as small as possible with an inventory of parts that should be justified. The BeOS/Haiku footprint is about 300MB. I remember that a QNX with minimal desktop and browser once fit into a floppy and made BeOS look bloated :-). I also fondly recall MacOS being quite petite too, 20MB or so plus apps.

Usually Win2K, XP, OSX, and Ubuntu usually fill out at around 8GB with about 40 apps each. Vista though needed a whopping 30GB.

For fun I recently tried microXP at 3GB and tinyVista at 8GB with same 40 apps. A more minimal microXP install with only FF, Winamp, VLC, Codewarrior, and a few others now easily fits in 1GB on a CF card, I can now work diskless if I want.

With no apps added, microXP actually fits in about 280MB (less than even Haiku) and tinyVista about 3GB. Both are far more snappy and usable than their legit versions, if only Microsoft had the ability to make such versions.

Although I will be trying out Haiku more and more, I think I can now fall back on microXP until Haiku is ready.